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Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Purge of Turkish Academics is "Staggering"

Academe Blog
By Hank Reichman
July 21, 2017

In the year since the attempted coup in Turkey, a "staggering" number of academics have faced criminal investigations, detentions, prosecutions, mass dismissal, expulsion and restrictions on travel, according to an open letter to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, signed by Quinn, executive director of Scholars at Risk (SAR), the New York University-based scholar network, and reported in University World News.

Shortly after hundreds of thousands of people joined a mass rally in Istanbul on July 16 against the Erdoğan regime, the government announced that it had arrested almost 900 people over the previous week, including 72 university staff. On July 13, the state announced that some 302 scholars had been dismissed from their jobs for their alleged links to the Gülen movement, which is blamed for the failed military coup.